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I’ve some good news to share: our alliance that aims to help victims of ransomware has become even stronger. We launched the project called No More Ransom together with Europol, the Dutch police, and our esteemed industry colleagues Intel Security just a couple of months ago. And we can now announce that we’ve just taken some new members on board – law enforcement agencies from a further 13 countries have signed up to fight ransomware together with the private sector.

The new members are: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Colombia, France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, no less.

In just two months we’ve helped thousands of users get their data back – without paying more than $1 mln in ransom. And these new members are only going to improve things – to strike at the ransomware curse harder still.

Ransomware is malware that attacks a victim’s computer by encrypting valuable files, and then demanding a ransom to decrypt them. It represents a growing problem all over the world. In the recent years we’ve witnessed a skyrocketing of such attacks – something like a 550% increase in 2015-2016 compared to the previous 12 months and the epidemics are far from over.

The list of victims of ransomware grows longer by the day, and now includes hospitals, police departments, and all kinds of businesses, worldwide.

The problem is that if your files get encrypted there’s precious little you can do without the decryption key – provided the malware was designed without flaws, that is. And you can only get the key from the criminals who attacked you, or from security companies and law enforcement agencies if they succeed in seizing the keys from the criminals.

We hear a lot of talk (and to be frank, talk ourselves a lot) about the benefits of public-private partnerships in the IT security field. No More Ransom demonstrates perfectly how such alliances can bring positive change. The first example of such collaboration came in 2015 when we disrupted the CoinVault ransomware scam. It was a close-knit joint operation with the Dutch police. We helped them investigate the case, they seized the server and the encryption keys, which in turn helped us create a decryption tool that anyone could use for free. Then they arrested the perpetrators.

It is a natural synergy: it’s the job of security researches to analyze malware code and extract the information on the command & control servers that are used to run the scam. Armed with this information, police can physically take down the servers and get their hands on all the data on them including Bitcoin wallets and encryption keys databases. After that it is possible to develop a decrypting tool to help out the victims.